The Jewel in the Crown.
Steve Cohen, NYU, spoke Sunday 5 of a new cold war that is a dominant theme in Moscow since the early years of the Bush administration and that continues zestfully into the new Obama administration. POTUS has reversed his campaign pledge to cancel the deployment of a part of SDI into Poland and the Czech Republic. POTUS has not commented on the plans for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. Vladimir Putin insists upon both the discontinuing of SDI at the borders of Russia and that Ukraine and Georgia remain out of NATO. Of all the jewels, Ukraine is the most treasured in the crown of Imperial Russia (Putin is a ferverish nationalist) and will not be permitted to break away. Putin is adamant. The Russians are conducting live-fire military exercises on the Georgian border at this moment as a clear insult to the POTUS visit. Steve Cohen told me the military exercises are also a response to the NATO war games of two weeks ago on Georgia. The new cold war is bruising both ways.
What Is To Be Done?
The chatter (above) about missile decommissioning is facile. The unearned smiles on POTUS and Putin's choice stooge Dmitry Medvedev illustrate the aimlessness and harmlessness of the ceremony. Steve Cohen pointed to the efforts by Russia to present concessions, such as opening an air corridor over Russia territory to reach Afghanistan. The US is not offering any concessions. Both Steve Cohen and George Friedman, Stratfor.com, mentioned that the US needs Russian's help with Iran, but that Russia will not offer and the US is not in position to ask. Steve Cohen's recommendation is that Washington listen to Moscow's priorities with regard security, trade and the threat of the jihadists to Russia's Moslem population. George Friedman looks to Poland as a vital and long term fertile ally in Eastern Europe that will eclipse Russia and link closely to Europe and North America. None of these concerns are on the table for the conversations in Moscow. Today POTUS meets with Putin. Putin is a vastly more potent and militant leader than POTUS. The Moscow verdict on POTUS may have been communicated by a member of the ruling party to the Wall Street Journal correspondent at the White House, Jonathan Weisman. "Overall, Russia is skeptical of Obama," said Sergei Markov, a senior legislator from the ruling United Russia party. "They are afraid he could be a smiling George Bush."
Okay, I'm getting really confused.
I thought everyone knew that Obama had been hand picked by the Bush family to continue the objectives of the dynasty and further the progression towards the New World Order. Now, there are questions of him carrying on with the same policies as his predecessor? I guess, Pravda missed out on reporting the story or Russian intelligence believed it saw something to repudiate the claim or, maybe, just flat out didn't believe it.
Surely, they aren't that far out of the loopy! Surely, this is just fodder for folk!
DANGERS OF BALTICISATION OF CHINA’S PERIPHERY
B.RAMAN
There has been an uneasy calm in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Province of China, after nearly 36 hours of bloody rioting by over 3000 Uighur students, supported by others. No fresh incident of violence was reported on the night of July 6, 2009.
2. A curfew is in force and reinforcements have been rushed to Urumqi from the Sichuan province. Fearing fresh unrest in Tibet, the Chinese have stepped up security measures in the Tibetan-inhabited areas.
3.The Chinese provincial authorities have admitted that 156 people---129 men and 27 women--- were killed in the
riots and that the security forces in Urumqi have taken 1434 persons into preventive custody.
4.While there is uneasy calm in Urumqi, there are reports of spreading demonstrations from the rural areas, including Kashgar, which has been a hotbed of the activities of Islamic fundamentalist elements supporting the Islamic Movement of Eastern Turkestan, which is allied with Al Qaeda.
5. While the protest demonstrations in Urumqi, which led to the violent riots due to over-reation by the Chinese security forces,
were largely led by liberal human rights elements with no links to the IMET and other fundamentalist organisations, reliable reports indicate that the protest demonstrations in Kashgar and other interior areas are being led by jihadi elements close to the IMET. The protesters have been shouting "Allah Is Great" slogans. This slogan was reportedly absent during the demonstrations in Urumqi. The protest demonstrations in Kashgar started from a local mosque.
6. The Chinese intelligence agencies have once again been taken by surprise as they were by the Tibetan uprising of March,2008. While they had been taking routine security precautions in view of the forthcoming 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, they had not anticipated the kind of violence which Urumqi saw on the night of July 6.
7.The Chinese security agencies, which generally tend to blame jihadi terrorists of the IMET for all their problems in Xinjiang, have thus far refrained from doing so in respect of the violence in Urumqi. They have been blaming it on "ethnic separatist terrorism" and not on "jihadi terrorism."
8.They are blaming the Munich-based World Uighur Congress (WUC) for the Urumqi violence just as they blamed the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) for the violence in Lhasa last year. A campaign for the demonisation of the WUC has already been started by the provincial authorities similar to the campaign for the demonisation of the TYC witnessed last year. Just as they projected the TYC as no different from Al Qaeda in its methods, they are projecting the WYC similarly.
9. Their suspicions and fears have been aggravated by the close links allegedly maintained by the WUC with the USA's National Endoment for Democracy (NED) and the Unrepresnted Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) based in Holland. The UNPO had played an active role in promoting the separation of the Baltic States from the erstwhile USSR. It had trained people from the Baltic States for many years. It has a similar active programme for the training of Uighurs from the diaspora. This training programme is allegedly being funded by the NED. At
least two training camps have already been held.
10.Leaders of the WUC, including its President Ms. Rebiya Kadeer, who lives in the US, have strongly denied Chinese allegations that the WUC had instigated the Urumqi riots, but it is intriguing that the unprecedented outbreak followed less than two months after the WUC held its Third General Assembly in Washington, DC from May 21-25, 2009 . Delegates and observers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Norway, Sweden, Turkey and the the US attended the Assembly. Ms. Rebiya Kadeer was re-elected as the President of the WUC.
11.The WUC was established on April 16, 2004 in Munich, Germany, by merging the East Turkestan National Congress and the World Uighur Youth Congress. It describes its main objective as to promote the right of the Uighur people to use peaceful, nonviolent, and democratic means to determine the political future of East Turkestan.
12.The Lhasa uprising of March,2008, and the Urumqi uprising of July 2009 have brought home a rude lesson to the Chinese ---- namely, that they cannot take China's unity and stability for granted. What happened in the Baltic States of the USSR can happen in China's periphery inhabited by non-Han minorities if they do not pay attention to their grievances, anger and political and cultural aspirations. (7-7-09)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and ,presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
The closest thing I’ve seen to ghosts is the stray dogs that live here on the beach and elsewhere. Unlike their domestic counterparts, they do not bark, tug on leashes, get hit by cars or dirty the sidewalks. They move unobtrusively among humans (and their domesticated companions) without breaking their unfathomable routines. They truly live in a world of their own, entirely oblivious to the tension-filled spaces of modern life while, at the same time, feeding off what humans carelessly discard along the wayside.
It works both ways. No attention is paid to the strays as well. It’s as if they don’t exist – like lizards, birds. I find it curious that there’s a building sporting an “Animal Welfare” sign barely a block from the beach where sick dogs abound, locked in their own private agonies. I see them day after day, scratching and biting themselves, their tumors growing; some have lost their fur entirely; some nurse broken legs; others are nearly blind.
In Russia, Obama will encounter the ghost of the Cold War still raging. Whereas it has all but passed on in the West, in Russia it’s still banging the pots inside the halls of the KGB. Our president will be hard pressed to persuade Putin to stop feeding that particular dog. That’s because it still rankles them that they lost (albeit fair and square).
Obama’s offer of peace will not connect. It lies outside their capacity to understand that America’s prostrations are not a trick. No one can be so deluded as to think that Marxism still has merit. They’ll see Obama as a trickster. Hasn’t he already managed to trick the American people into electing someone who appears to believe that economic success is the source of all evil? Hasn’t he been doing his utmost to unravel that which has taken centuries to build? “No, we can’t trust a man like that”, they will conclude. “We’ll humor him, but our policy of vigilance won’t change. Besides, America is worth more to us as an enemy. In this way we’ll have someone to blame when our own corrupt policies begin to fail.
“Still, it’s a pretty good ploy; you must admit - black man without pedigree; a messiah who is said to hate his own. One who claims he would run the old failed experiment all over again – for what? Peace? Revenge? Bloody-mindedness?
“It’s too much to expect us to believe And all this from a nation that only six month ago had still fought the good fight respectably. And if it turns out to be true, it’s even worse: the unraveling of a once great nation, creating a vacuum we can’t possibly fill.”
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
The Economic Forecasters used to talk about Brazil, Russia, India and China (the "BRIC Nations") now they talk about the BIC nations.
Russia is now a one trick-pony economy with a declining population and a sociopath as a PM.
They may be dangerous. They may not be relevant.